cpu display in max over 100% but everything ok in task manager (win)

I hope that this kind of trouble hasn’t been reported in another topic … I’m looking for an explanation since yesterday in the forum so please apologize if I missed a topic dealing with the same kind of issue.

Ok, so I’ll try to be as concise as possible.
– I have a main patch without any bpatcher ; only poly~ inside with parallel processing mode enabled.
– CPU consumption is far over 100% in Max display,so it "cracks"
– when running the windows task manager, I can see that none of the physical and logical core are overloaded. Each core works below 25%

If I disable the parallel processing mode of all poly~, cpu consumption displayed in max is the same as previously and I can clearly see one of the core overloaded in the core manager.

CPU use as displayed in the Audio Status window or via the adstatus object is calculated by taking the amount amount of time required to calculate a signal vector’s worth of audio divided by the amount of real time taken up by the signal vector.

So, if my signal vector is 1 second long and it takes me 1.25 seconds to calculate all the audio I need to go in there then I’m in trouble.

This is how it can appear that Max is bogged down but your computer is not. The answer is to play around with your IO and sig vector size settings – generally speaking the larger they are, the more audio you’ll be able to process.

However, it find it strange to notice that when not in parallel mode for polys in my patch, CPU consumption displayed in max is equal to the consumption on the CPU core "used" to calculate.
Does it mean that whatever the number of cores of my computer, max will overload when consumption equals to the the power that only one core can deliver? There is something I can’t picture, it looks like Max limits itself the power whereas there is a large amount of power available.

I can indeed play with sig and IO vectors but it seems that I won’t benefit from the entire power of my laptop isn’t it?
Which way could make benefit from this?

Many thanks for your support Andrew

P.S. : Andro -> thanks. About soundcards, I guess there is a difference in CPU consumption but isn’t it more linked to the driver than to the card itself? I don’t have any knowledge about this but I picture a soundcard like being a simple DAC without any power inside (if no FX Embedded). Am i wrong?

A good external soundcard allows much lower buffer/vector sizes in pretty much all audio driven software.
You can always try borrowing one from someone and see if that helps before you maybe purchase one.
I’ve done live inputs of guitar,bass,midi drums and 3 channels of vocals through ableton live, this was only possible with the extra "muscle" that a good external soundcard provides. An internal soundcard wouldn’t even pull off a buffer size (in live) of a 128 samples with the live sets that we had.
I use the presonus firestudio project, one amazing card with a lot of punch. :)